INCREASE YOUR SENSITIVITY
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Through meditation
(In response to a question: when I want to offer my seat to someone in a bus, I decide against it, but when I want to smoke a cigarette, even though I know it is not good, I get total concurrence from within to do it. Why?)
Your question is to do with morality. The question is, 'The mind agrees but the heart disagrees, why?' The reason is, when you take in something with your mind, you don't see its benefits clearly and deeply. But the cigarette has merged with your being. You have experienced it yourself. It is not through someone else's preaching; so your heart accepts it. But the happiness that you get by offering your seat to someone in the bus is something that you have not experienced deeply. You have been told by people that it is good to offer your seat to an elderly person in the bus, that's all. The former is an experience, whereas the latter is only a concept. What you have not experienced, will not attract or pull you to it. If you have really experienced the joy of helping others, you will only continue to help others.
True experience will happen when you start meditating. Our heart, which is as hard as a stone, will flower and become as soft and sensitive as cotton, and we will feel the need to help others. At present, we either read in some magazine or have been told by elders, that it is good to give our seat to elderly people in the bus. Instead, that feeling should flower within us and we should offer help. For this, meditation should have happened in us at some point in time of our lives. Sensitivity will
become a way of life only if meditation has happened in you, else it will remain just skin deep. To push the preaching received through the mind to the heart requires a drilling machine - that is meditation. Then, justice, honesty and similar virtues taught to us, will become a way of life, and there will be a certain juice that you feel when following it. Else, all these virtues will remain as intellectual knowledge without turning into experiential knowledge.
Paramahamsa Salem, India
